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But we are digressing: we must resume our enquiry into the
cause of dissimilarity among relations. Yet we must first be
informed what reality, common to all cases, is possessed by this
Existence derived from mutual conditions.
Now the common principle in question cannot be a body. The only
alternative is that, if it does exist, it be something bodiless,
either in the objects thus brought together or outside of them.
Further, if Relation always takes the same form, the term is
univocal [and specific differentiation is impossible]; if not,
that is if it differs from case to case, the term is equivocal,
and the same reality will not necessarily be implied by the mere
use of the term Relation.
How then shall we distinguish relations? We may observe that some
things have an inactive or dormant relation, with which their
actuality is entirely simultaneous; others, combining power and
function with their relation, have the relation in some mode
always even though the mode be merely that of potentiality, but
attain to actual being only in contact with their correlatives.
Or perhaps all distinctions may be reduced to that between
producer and product, where the product merely gives a name to
the producer of its actuality: an example of this is the relation
of father to son, though here both producer and product have a
sort of actuality, which we call life.
Are we thus, then, to divide Relation, and thereby reject the
notion of an identical common element in the different kinds of
Relation, making it a universal rule that the relation takes a
different character in either correlative? We must in this case
recognise that in our distinction between productive and
non-productive relations we are overlooking the equivocation
involved in making the terms cover both action and passion, as
though these two were one, and ignoring the fact that production
takes a different form in the two correlatives. Take the case of
equality, producing equals: nothing is equal without equality,
nothing identical without identity. Greatness and smallness both
entail a presence- the presence of greatness and smallness
respectively. When we come to greater and smaller, the
participants in these relations are greater and smaller only when
greatness and smallness are actually observed in them.
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